Seventy-nine percent of parents say their child is receiving mostly B’s or better, and 89 percent believe their child is at or above grade level in reading and math, according to a new recent Gallup-Learning Heroes study, report Jennifer Dineen and Andrea Malek Ash.

But standardized test scores show that’s not true for at least half of students. The gap between parents’ perceptions and test scores is very large for black and Hispanic students.

More than 85 percent of black and Hispanic parents think their child is at grade level in reading or math: NAEP reports 17 percent of black students and 21 percent of Hispanics show grade-level proficiency. (It’s 42 percent for whites.)

[It’s by design. If parents really knew how well their child did from the grades they receive, they’d raise holy hell at school board meetings. The schools and teacher unions don’t want their failures exposed. — Ed]